Watch stacking

AshleyC

AshleyC

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Had a go at focus stacking with reasonable results. Theres a couple of blurry bands still there though. I did it just by moving the focus point along rather than moving the camera. People say to move the camera but i cant see how that works, surely each frame is going to be totally different so PS wouldnt be able to line things up?

 
I flippin' love that! (y)
Blurry bands aside I think you've done well there and as busy as the shot is I'm still drawn to the watch face.

How many shots did you use? Regarding the method, either will work fine as the software is more than capable of resizing and stacking accurately.
I have a cheapo macro rail which I've used successfully and I've also used Magic Lantern which keeps the camera static and automatically alters the focal point with each shot.
 
Have you tried Zerene Stacker? It's extremely intuitive and easy to use, and reasonably priced. I find keeping the camera static, and adjusting the focus from from front to back works for me.

Love the lighting, btw. (y)
 
Thanks peeps :) I was using photoshop with its auto merge thing. I'll give that Zerene a go and see if it makes a difference. This was 19 shots and then cropped out from the final image as the borders were all blurred out. Ive got a cheapo macro rail too but it cant hold the weight of the camera and lens too well! I might splash out on a posher one at some point.
 
just looked and dont have it anymore, must of binned it. I know it was just a cheapy off ebay. Once loaded up with the camera it was a bit rattley and fiddly to smoothly move the camera.
 
essexash said:
just looked and dont have it anymore, must of binned it. I know it was just a cheapy off ebay. Once loaded up with the camera it was a bit rattley and fiddly to smoothly move the camera.
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I meant what camera body. If it's a Canon then I'd definitely recommend trying out Magic Lantern.
If it's the 'other' brand then unlucky. :p
 
sorry :) its a D800 with the Tamron 90mm macro

I tried the Zerene stacker program and it ran out of memory! Not sure if it was a restriction of the demo, but i cut the file sizes down and it did a pretty decent job. I liked the way you can see the image build up in real time, makes a change from a progress bar :)

And for scale purposes, the small cogs in the middle are about 4mm across, so god knows how big the dust specs are that you can see. I was pretty suprised the Tamron resolved that much.
 
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Magic lantern only works with Canon bodies unfortunately, I'm surprised someone hasn't written a similar firmware for Nikon as I'm sure it would be very popular.
 
I have Zerene stacker and just did a stack of 60 photos no prob with memory ... raw files converted to tiff in lightroom and exported to Zerene stacker..

really like the watch well done ..
 
First of all, that is a nice stack, I like a lot, wish I could find a load of cogs and spare watch part around to do something like this.. Love the large clock face, give the shot a real punch. Well done. :)

I use Zerene stacker and have to say I don't have a lot of issues with memory, for the close ups I've been processing I have to use a cropped sensor, due to vignette issues, however these are still large files and I've stacked over 200 images in one stack without issue, but I do have a fastish laptop with 8gb of ram, I do know people with less powerful machines and still done have problems, they just take longer to process.
I do the basically the same as bb123 however I load my raw into photoshop raw, sync my stack and save out as tiff file and run those through Zerene Satcker, normally I use PMax, and slowly venturing into DMap, I have to say it's a powerful program and just for easy stacks at the moment just use align all images and then run PMax, and save output tiff, that's how I do most stacks at the moment. There are other stacking programs around to try, a free one is CombineZP
 
I got mine off ebay. The whole steampunk thing is quite big and lots of people like making jewelry and things out of all these cogs :) Just do a search for watch parts on ebay and youll be spoilt for choice. I got a couple of tobacco tins full of bits for a tenner.

i think the memory issue was me just dumping 20 D800 raw files into it and it had an aneurism over it! If i had put sensibly sized tiffs in then all would of been fine.
 
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